West African French

Preparing a set of training materials on avian flu for a workshop in Djibouti starting on Thursday has had me dusting off my rusty French. I can now say, with complete conviction, IAHP, influenza aviaire hautement pathogène; have been gently rehearsing my plural possessives.

One of the veterinarians who will be teaching this course is Senegalese. His plane tickets to Djibouti via Nairobi got all messed up. His English is rudimentary. He was frantic. I took a deep breath and called him on his cellphone in Dakar; he calmed down.

It comes back: The words, the intonation, the oddly puzzled expression necessary for these morphemes, the different facial musculature. Now Nicole’s gone east, I’ve not had much chance to speak in French at all, and it’s a shame.

Yesterday, up the hill in Winters, we heard a crackle on the radio. Cameroun??— I said. It wasn’t: it was Côte d’Ivoire, but I had the accent quite close. He was talking on the radio to a man from the Midi who was on a sailing trip (?) somewhere in the Caribbean. When they switched frequencies we lost the Africa portion but continued to hear the twice-repeated phrases from Guadeloupe or wherever it was.

I would LOVE to get on the radio in French. And Spanish. There are possibilities looming, here…